Response for week of 03/23/09

“Consider the portrayal of the female characters in The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds from a feminist critic's perspective. What do you notice?”

In class on March 18th, we discussed some questions that a feminist theorist might ask herself when approaching and reading a text. A feminist critic would probably ask herself some of the same questions. Two questions we identified are, “How are the female characters portrayed?” and, “How do the male characters respond to the female characters?”

Beatrice seems to be portrayed as someone who has been spurned by people in the past, and also still seems to yearn for everyone’s approval on some level. For example, she bitterly talks about Nanny’s business woman daughter, but to me there were underlying tones of her wishing that she could compete and earn the daughter’s respect. The main male character that we see, or hear, her interact with is Mr. Goodman. We can only guess his response to her, since we only hear her side of the phone conversations that comprise their interaction. In my opinion, he doesn’t really know how to handle her. He seems to want to understand her because he wants to know why Tilly is frequently absent from school, but she just brushes him off and feeds him lines to appease and flatter him. It doesn’t seem like he buys into her flattery, although I don’t get the impression that he knows what to do with her.

Tilly is portrayed as a smart day-dreamer. She’s gifted in science, and uses it as an escape from her home-life. A feminist critic might find it interesting that science is the field in which she excels, since science is a typically a field dominated by men. As with Beatrice, Mr. Goodman is the male character she has the most interaction with, although they aren’t in any scenes together. We only hear of their interactions through Tilly’s accounts of them. He seems to be sort of a fatherly figure to her and it seems like he gives her guidance and inspiration.

To me, Ruth is portrayed as somewhat of an attention-seeker. She wears the lipstick and revealing clothes to stand out at school, maybe to distract her peers from her “history”. She is hired as a science assistant, which strikes me as odd because I don’t get the impression that she is scholastically gifted. I assume from this that Mr. Goodman has a very different response to her than to Tilly. Maybe as the assistant he hopes to be a positive influence on her, like he seems to want to be for Tilly, or maybe he likes having her around for other reasons.